CRESCENT
CITY
CHROME
It's
the mid 2020's and the "City that care forgot" is looking a little care-worn.
The 2006 New Madrid Quake finally pushed the river over to the Achafalya
Basin, tearing the economic heart from the city. (Not to mention redrawing
maps from St. Louis to Memphis and killing millions of people) A few months
prior to the quake, the tech stock bubble finally burst, and it was looking
like the ghosts of 1929 were about to strike the world markets again. The
Federal Reserve managed to stabilize the economy until "the big one" hit
the mid-west. The disruption caused by the quake was amplified a thousand
fold by the low inventory/fast delivery business practices of the information
age. Only now is the world recovering from those hammer-blows, and in the
US they expect to be able to end the state of Martial Law that's been in
place since the Western Rebellion of the 20-teens.
TIMELINE
(UNDER CONSTRUTION)
THE CITY
(UNDER CONSTRUCTION)
PERSONALITIES
(UNDER CONSTRUCTION)
GEAR
(UNDER CONSTRUCTION)
One
of the first real role-playing (as opposed to "roll-playing") games I tried
to run was R. Talsorian's original Cyberpunk. Rather than use Night City,
I set the game in my hometown of New Orleans. One of the many mistakes
I made was trying to keep what I considered to be the "feel" of New Orleans.
Turns out I was really trying to keep the charm of the city. Needless to
say, it didn't work out too well and I just figured the New Orleans didn't
take well to chroming.
What
can I say, I was a college freshman at the time and was having trouble
with that whole ass from a hole in the ground thing. :-) New Orleans in
the 20th century is Cyberpunk without the props and matte paintings. Our
police force would disgrace most third world tin-pot dictatorships, and
our politicians are the platonic ideal of corrupt power politics. A further
C-punk touch is the way those politicians bend over for big corparate money.
Only the Federal govenment keeps the state from being as polluted as the
border factories across the Rio Grande. The disparity of wealth borders
on the absurd, with Filthy Rich and Dead Broke folks living within blocks
of each other. And then there's the whole class thing. If those Filthy
Rich aren't Old Money, then certain doors are forever sealed to them. Class
even superceeds race here, at certain levels. After all, in the pre-Civil
War days, there were black plantation owners who held large numbers of
slaves in south Louisiana.